Sunday, March 11, 2007

Daylight Savings Ttime computer date crisis!

Date problems on computers

Computer people can be so weird. They are fully self-absorbed and for reasons that are not clear to me, computer people love to panic. Remember all of the panic about Y2K?

Even today, there were dire warnings about the possibility of widespread database corruption from a “MINI Y2K” big! According to the Gloom and Doom computer jockeys, the USA change to daylight savings time (DST) requires something called a “patch” (patches? What, the software has holes?).

There are even threats from the quantoid world of Linux. This web site claims that there is a date bug waiting in UNIX.

"January 19, 2038 is a date which will live in infamy. It is on that day that the 32-bit integer storing the number of seconds since the beginning of The Epoch will overflow, causing death and destruction unseen by the world since the Y2K Bug"

Actually, the 32-bit servers of the early 21st century are rapidly going to the same scrap heap as our Timex Sinclair, Commodore 64 and 8088 PC’s. By “scrap heap”, I mean that they will be in high demand on eBay.

Wow! This eBay search shows that you can your old Timex Sinclair for up to $20, cash!